Brandon Schollenberger writes:
As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.
To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.
The Poll follows.
Please feel free to participate and/or share the survey with anyone you’d like:
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jblyccj8lluam18284546
Note: the poll is just one page, and after submitting you’ll get a “make your own survey” ad page.
Markopanama, I don’t agree. There is nothing wrong with using self-selected samples. The key is recognizing they are self-selected. Some surveys have actually sought to examine who responded and who didn’t to look for trends. A useful consistency check is to compare the demographics of who responds to the demographics of the overall population.
That said, there’s basically no way to do that when dealing with a publicly posted survey on the internet. Such a survey can still be useful though. You can say you’ve found patterns while recognizing there may be unknown influences due to selection issues. It’s a great way to find ideas to research further.
People often fail to treat issues with self-selected samples appropriately, but that doesn’t mean they’re scientifically useless. Many things in science are informative but not conclusive. That’s what self-selected samples tend to be.
I once saw Bigfoot.
It was jammed in Lewandowsky’s mouth.
“Big Foot” the worlds original monster truck.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2akYw9VucA ]
Markopanama noted @ur momisugly January 10, 2014 at 4:42 pm;
And to craft an intentionally loaded survey to scientifically explicate the fallacious loading of a previous survey, is a good deal less simple yet.
I hope that Brandon Schollenberger posts the results and (the trick part) his analysis at the earliest practical point! 😉
Some of those questions were wrong, [snip]
Mark Nutley, I intentionally picked examples of things I couldn’t imagine anyone approving of in order to make it obvious my results weren’t legitimate. I don’t want people to hear me say this methodology “proves X” and actually believe it. I want people to hear this methodology proves “X group supports genocide” and think, “That methodology must be stupid.”
Ted Clayton, I’ve taken a look at the preliminary data and I’m confident I have results people will be interested in. Right now I’m debating on how long to let the survey run. I think I may close it out after its run for 24 hours. That’d leave me with plenty of data (likely over 5,000 responses), and it’d let me work on the writeup.
Alternatively, I may just work on a draft of a writeup for now and leave the survey open. Once I’m finished with that draft, I can close the survey and examine the new data to see if it matches what I’ve written. That’d be more work, but it might be worth it.
Another thing I have to decide is how I want to write it up. I don’t intend to publish this in a scientific journal, but it might be worth writing it up like I were. I could easily get a few thousand words out of this. Alternatively, I could just turn it into a simple blog post. Or I could make it a series of blog posts. There’s lots of options.
I was planning on figuring out my game plan while I waiting for the data collection, but the data came in far more quickly than I anticipated. That’s thrown off the schedule.
Wikipedia entry for Self-selection bias
There are still useful investigations that can be done with data from self-selected cohorts (and with malformed survey questions), but there are added requirements, to keep it valid, and more limitations.
Alan Robertson says:
January 10, 2014 at 3:19 pm “Wait a minute WAIT A MINUTE- what about if someone’s (won’t say who) only seen space aliens on the psychic planes, but has been abducted by Bigfoot (bigfeet)?”
Everybody knows that aliens don’t abduct people anymore but advance consciousness through ESP contact with humans. Especially the ones on planet Nabiru, which NASA is hiding from you. They might put a chip in your brain but if not, the psychic contact will help you to believe in free energy and contrails.
Free energy is obtained by putting your feet on the coffee table and collecting scalar waves with your toes. You then transmit the free energy to users by broadcasting with your big mouth on the internet. But you have to get rid of nasty coal and oil first, or no free energy for you.
bshollenberger says @ur momisugly January 10, 2014 at 5:35 pm;
I agree that these data are sure to be very interesting, and can be ‘mined’ for valuable insight from a range of perspectives & purposes.
Formalisms are not everything, and they often are not even “first” things.
The Open Source Movement chants: “Release [Publish] now; release [publish] often”! If you were of a mind & preference to go with incremental drafts, and let the survey run, I too would see that as promising.
“A Beginner’s Guide to Uncertainty of Measurement Stephanie Bell”
Why would we be measuring Stephanie Bell? Is she particularly measurable?
Brandon:
About “Have a wonderful Mother…”, my Mother has been a deceased Mother for decades which leaves me with the distasteful feeling that stating I ‘have’ a wonderful Mother because she is passed on?
I marked that question disagree.
Jeff Alberts says:
January 10, 2014 at 6:53 pm “A Beginner’s Guide to Uncertainty of Measurement Stephanie Bell” Why would we be measuring Stephanie Bell? Is she particularly measurable?
It’s the old “go-for-a-cruise-to-measure-global-warming-and-get-stuck-in-ice” trick.
“Global warming is a real.”
Say I’m a typical journalist. If you want me to believe in fairies, that will set you back one maravedi. To believe in Santa Claus, two maravedis. Global warming is a real.
re·al (ray-äl), n. pl. re·als or re·al·es (-äls): A silver coin formerly used in Spain and Latin America.
But make me an offer.
jorgekafkazar says:
January 10, 2014 at 7:33 pm
_________________________
ja ja ja ja
I don’t believe in Bigfoot, I live in Australia! But I have seen programs on it, but there again we make money from that don’t we. In Australia they had a mythical Aboriginal creature called a Bunyip. About Big Foot, there is no palaeoanthropological reports of any primate living in North America, only the warmer south America, or Australia. So don’t tell me one hairy primate survived the ice age! Same as the Loch Ness Monster. Dragons etc. The Yeti. Other than the last it makes good tourism and historical references.
You have .. a wonderful mother.
While Newsweek claims to know where she is and even sent her a “Welcome Back” mailing, she continues to .. well .. same status as Generalísimo Francisco Franco, without Hell.
@ur momisugly bshollenberger
1) Why not publish the results in a scientific journal?
2) Are you getting many responses answered from the global warming believers “perspective”? (Since Lew’s methodology was to “ask” global warming believers what global warming skeptics think, to use the Lew method to prove just how evil global warming believers really are (wink) a bunch of us need to answer as if we’re global warming believers.) (PS: it’s well known global warming believers hate their mothers, I expect this survey to confirm that long standing scientific consensus.)
My wnderful mother is deceased and I am alive. since she formed my mind and heart, I HAVE a wonderful mother.
I also have a wonderful website to read with the funniest commenters on Earth. I love you people!
John West, because the results are obviously nonsensical. There’s no way it’d pass peer-review. Even if the reviewers couldn’t see what was wrong with the methodology, they’d reject the paper because of its conclusions alone.
That said, it might be possible to turn this into a non-facetious paper. I could explain exactly what I did, why it was wrong and how it lead to nonsensical results. I could then demonstrate how the process could be extrapolated to work with different groups and different results to allow an individual to “prove” practically anything he or she wanted about any group. That might be publishable. It’d be a lot of work though. I’m not sure it’d be worth the trouble when a similar thing could be just published online.
On a silly note, I took an hour break to look into the possibility of writing a facetious paper about this survey’s results. I got 500 words written, about a dozen references lined up and a superficially plausible argument designed. I don’t think I could get a mock paper through peer review, but I’m pretty confident I could write one on par with at least some of what gets promoted by global warming advocates.
As for your 2, you’re suffering from a common misunderstanding. Lewandowsky did not ask global warming proponents what skeptics believe. He asked them what they believe. He then used bizarre mathematics (i.e. voodoo) to interpret that data as proving skeptics believe certain things.
What Lysenko spawned.
At this moment there is a flashing advertisement which tells me I could win an IPad etc etc I
I don’t believe that either. Unless the internet is causing this global warming thing! The thought just struck me. Think of all those banks of servers ( such as Google) placed in large secure warehouses in cooler parts of the world so that they won’t over heat…….
I’m curious what the “mother” question has to do with Dr Looniedullsky. And yes, as people have said I think it misses the important questions – JFK, Apollo landings, 9/11, whether the Kenyan is actually a practicing Muslim etc.
“In Australia they had a mythical Aboriginal creature called a Bunyip.”
I’m not so certain that bunyips are mythical – there’s a view that they are in fact the larger cousin of the modern drop bear but didn’t head south as quick as the drop bear before the land bridge from Indonesia closed. But the North West is so lightly explored that it’s possible that a few made it before dying out during the Ice Ace.
Can’t wait for the results and the following paper. Great fun.
@ur momisugly bshollenberger
I agree that Lewandowsky did not ask global warming proponents what skeptics believe, but rather what he did was “ask” global warming proponents what skeptics believe. In other words he posted the survey on GW proponents’ blogs implicitly inviting fake responses.
”In any event, virtually all of the respondents appear to have come from the eight stridently anti-skeptic blocs, with most presumably referred by Deltoid, Tamino and Skeptical Science. …..
Lucia sized up Lewandowsky’s methodology (in her usual to-the-point style) as follows:
….. numerous responses had been faked – that warmists had pretended to be skeptics, and, in some cases, responded in grotesque caricature ….
…. practically invited fake responses satirizing skeptics ….
….Lewandowsky’s argument is completely insufficient to dismiss the possibility that 4-5% of the responses were warmists having some fun pretending to be skeptics”
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/
(Not that this particular methodology faux pas made the most difference to the results, but it seems likely to have made some impact.)